Ambulance chiefs vow to improve responses

AMBULANCE chiefs are still failing to get help to emergency patients on time.

East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS), under fire over poor response times, came up with an action plan last October to get better.

It said that, by February, it expected to be hitting the national standard of getting to 75 per cent of patients in a life-threatening state within eight minutes.

And EMAS interim chief executive Sue Noyes had previously said it was ‘not acceptable’ to wait any longer for these improvements.

But new figures showed its performance actually got worse, with response times slower than January.

Paul Ferguson, the trust’s assistant director of operations for Derbyshire, said he believed this was because EMAS spent much of February putting the measures in place which would bring about the improvements.

And he said the trust had been performing much better in March.

He said: “February is almost a bit of a distant past for us because we have seen improvements in the past three weeks.

“And, two weeks ago, we hit all three of our key targets for reaching patients quickly enough.”